The Agenda: Business

An eagerness to expand can take leaders down slippery slopes if they don’t have a clear direction. Luckily for Sara Molnar, the president and ceo of Sweden-based outdoor clothing company Peak Performance, navigating challenging terrain comes as second nature.

A lifelong skiing and freeride competitor, Molnar arrived at the Scandinavian brand in 2016 after a successful but ultimately unfulfilling career in the legal and financial sectors. “I noticed how other people spoke about their work with pride and passion, and wanted to have that feeling too,” she tells monocle. “My connection to Peak Performance goes back to my childhood, which I spent skiing, and the community around the brand.”

Now, Molnar is leading Peak Perfor­mance’s trans­formation, guiding it through uncharted territory as the company grows. “You can’t expand globally without knowing who you are and what you stand for,” she says. “It’s about disciplined growth.”

The brand was founded in the 1980s by skiers who wanted to combine technical functionality and innovation with stylish design. “We have to stay true to that idea and not just slap a logo on products to commercialise them,” adds Molnar. “Otherwise, we would lose our edge.”

Peak Performance’s recent shop openings in Berlin, Vancouver and London – as well as new locations in China – offer the company fresh opportunities to learn and build a bigger community. That’s why, for Molnar, retail remains at the heart of the business. As the business continues its slalom across the world, the challenge is becoming how to balance the company’s global aspirations with the importance of honouring its Scandinavian roots.

“The shop is where you truly engage with your community and get to understand customer desires,” says Molnar. “You rely on shop staff as key brand ambassadors.” Sometimes, she explains, the hardest thing is to continue as you are, despite facing different challenges and consumers. “We often say that we are mountain born,” she says. “There is a Swedish sense of humility in letting the products that you make speak for themselves.”
For more on how to avoid going too off-piste in your business career, listen to Monocle Radio’s podcast, ‘The Entrepreneurs’.

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Q&A

Daniel Bense
Founder, To My Ships

Few luxury skincare labels have received as much acclaim as Aesop. In September, Daniel Bense, an alumnus of the Australian brand, launched his own line of natural deodorants and perfumes. The collection, To My Ships, joins an increasingly lucrative industry valued at $21.8bn (€19.9bn) in 2023. Bense tells monocle about demand in a crowded market and lessons learnt from his time at Aesop.

How do you want your product to resonate?
Our focus is on how the product is experienced by the customer. Packaging plays an important role. We worked with FormaFantasma to design our bottles and boxes. The studio’s thoughtful approach resonated with our own values.

How do you approach product development?
It is only worth creating quality products that are effective and a pleasure to use. Naturally, we started at the beginning with a well-defined brief. The goal is to give an uplifting experience.

Is there still demand for new luxury cosmetics brands?
Yes, there will always be space for brands that aspire to do things better than those who have come before them.

How did your experience at Aesop help this project?
I basically had an apprenticeship in balancing creative vision with commercial success in a high-growth, high-touch business.
tomyships.com

While most fashion companies claim to be committed to sustainability, Bordeaux-based trainer brand Zèta is walking the talk. Founded by designer and entrepreneur Laure Babin, it uses waste from agricultural production, such as grapes and corn, to make its shoes. Everything in its production chain is derived from recycled materials, including the boxes in which each pair is shipped. This level of control, however, poses technical challenges. “Our Portuguese artisans find the innovative materials that we use more difficult to work with, so it takes longer to make our shoes,” says Babin.

Following a partnership with Nespresso on its Moka collection, which used waste from coffee production, the brand’s latest model, the Olea (pictured), features a material called Oleatex, developed in Turkey. It’s created from the crushed remnants of olives generated during the production of oil.

To date, Zèta has sold 40,000 pairs of shoes, through its website and its physical shop in Bordeaux, as well as a network of independent distributors in Europe and Asia. To finance the next phase of its expansion, the company is currently raising capital and has invited customers to become investors to support its research and development of sustainable materials.

“Our next project is a 100 per cent biodegradable pair with seeds built into the sole,” says Babin. The idea is that customers will be able to plant their worn-out shoes and literally give them a second life as flowers and shrubs.
zeta-shoes.com

Tesla was once the king of high-end electric vehicles (EVs) but Elon Musk’s brand is showing signs of slowing down in some markets. Despite record sales across the globe last year, numbers are down in 2024 in both US and European regions. Other luxury EV makers sense an opportunity. Among them is Californian start-up Lucid Motors, a publicly traded company since 2021 that was founded by former Tesla vehicle engineer Peter Rawlinson.

Lucid’s mission statement is to build “the most captivating luxury EVs centred around the human experience” and it has access to some deep pockets that could help it reach its goal. Its biggest investor is Ayar, an affiliate of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which owns about 60 per cent of the company. Faced with a difficult EV market, the Saudi fund has injected more cash this year, taking its total tally to about $8bn (€7bn). This helped sales to jump to $200m (€182m) in the second quarter of this year, up 70.5 per cent year on year – but the company is still losing money.

For Lucid to make the next jump, it needs to increase sales and expand into new market segments. With that in mind, the brand is expanding its line beyond the flagship Air sedan – retailing from just under $70,000 (€63,800) in the US – with the forthcoming Lucid Gravity suv, which is expected before the end of the year. Alongside building its own factory in Arizona, Lucid also opened a facility in Saudi Arabia last year. The aim? To bring down the cost of a new mid-sized vehicle and capture that all important (and much-needed) market share.

New property developments are bound to attract attention but a landlord’s job does not stop at the ribbon cutting. Managing these assets is often more challenging and success requires continual investment. Clarke Quay is a pedestrianised cluster of bars, restaurants and shops on the Singapore River that recently celebrated its 30th birthday with its second revamp.

The requirement for regular upkeep is a good lesson for place-making projects across Southeast Asia. Clarke Quay physically transformed downtown Singapore when it opened in 1993 (even if its commercial success was initially slow). After a brief period of success, it soon fell into disuse because consumers stayed away. This was blamed on the project’s inaccessibility, poorly curated shops and services, and lack of shelter from the elements. Then came a redevelopment in 2005. The opening of a nearby subway station shuttled in shoppers and a more enticing mix of tenants moved in. The effect was significant. “The market valuation when we started was near zero; they couldn’t lease it,” says Stephen Pimbley, who redesigned the area 20 years ago and now leads Spark* Architects.

Landlord CapitalLand learnt its lesson and now this fresh redevelopment, jointly handled by Meta Architecture and Formwekz Architects, will give Clarke Quay a more stable future. In April, the project boasted a 93 per cent committed occupancy, half of which is comprised of new concepts from international and homegrown brands. It was recently valued at €286m – an enhanced asset for CapitaLand and for all of Singapore.

The US’s oldest airline has announced South Korea’s Incheon International Airport as its new Asian hub. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, Delta Air Lines dropped all of its routes between North America and Tokyo’s Narita airport, from which it previously operated its Asia connections. Now, in collaboration with fellow SkyTeam alliance member Korean Air, the Atlanta-based carrier is introducing its first nonstop flight from Incheon to Salt Lake City International in June. The route allows Delta to offer those living in the interior states of the US a direct connection to Incheon, making onward journeys across the rest of the continent easier too.

Delta already operates direct flights there from Detroit, Atlanta and Seattle, carrying about 2,100 visitors to the South Korean airport per day. But with the new slc-icn route, it expects a further 180,000 passengers annually, with 94,000 transfers. That should bolster Incheon’s plan to cross the threshold of 106 million passengers annually across 600,000 flights.